Edward
De Vere was the most autobiographical dramatist in history and 'Hamlet'
is his most autobiographical work. "Every word doth almost speak" his
spiritual name. Virtually every event and character can be identified
from his life.

After reconciling with his wife, in 1583, still mourning the death
of their son who lived two days, they moved back to his ancestral
home Hedingham. He hadn't lived there since childhood.

To give a sense of his wife's emotional state in this phase, I include
an elegy she wrote:

The heavens, death, and life have conjured my ill
For death hath take away the breath of my son;
The heavens receive, and consent, that he hath done;
And my life doth keep me here against my will
But if our life be caused with moisture and heat,
I care neither for the death, the life, nor skies;
For I'll sigh him warmth, and wet him with my eyes;
(And thus I shall be thought a second Promet)
And as for life, let it do me all despite;
For if it leave me, I shall go to my child;
And it in the heavens, there is all my delight,
And if I live, my vertue is immortal,
" So that the heavens, death and life, when they do all
Their force: by sorrowful vertue th'are beguiled."

(quoted in Ruth Loyd Miller, 'Oxford Vistas', v. II, p. 79)

Here was Desdemona, Juliet, Hermione, Imogen, and Ophelia in
one soul.

De Vere had just seen 'Dido' in London, Aeneas' telling of the fall
of his lineage among the wreckage of Troy. Aeneas' tale had been
haunted by his father's death. Similarly De Vere's mourning for his
father was never separate from the theft of the ancient family lands,
including Hedingham. He had to sign that estate over to Cecil to
hold for his daughters. He had no heir.

Ashbourne Portrait
Edward De Vere ~ Age 35

Recent
news in London said that Katherine Hamlet had drowned
herself in a brook. Anna Perenna of Ovid had also.
De Vere known as the English
Ovid was familiar with the legend. Brooks, becks, streams, and fords
figured heavily in his ancestry and titles, and his Unconscious.
At Earl's Colne (thatched cottage), their hunting estate one night,
he heard the rectory bell toll a single knell. No one was there.
His mother had died there. Then, at Hedingham, he encountered his
father's ghost. Earl John lay in an unquiet grave.

In this time period, his
protector, the Earl of Sussex, Thomas Radcliffe, had died, warning
him about "the Beast", Leicester, who
had poisoned his rivals, including perhaps De Vere's father, and
whose wife was found dead at the foot of a stone stairs.

Also in 1583, his brother-in-law Peregrine Bertie sailed to Elsinore
Denmark as an ambassador to the king Frederick II. He encountered
a rich barbaric court that celebrated toasts by firing cannon balls
into the countryside. There Bertie met two families, the Rosenkrantz's
and Guldersterns. One of these made a return visit to England and
handed out gold coins to the aristocracy as trade diplomacy. From
Bertie's letters home and gossip, De Vere knew everything that happened.

How all these warnings and tidings converged into art, we don't
know. But deep change often sends a writer into the past to validate
the primal timelessness of his story. De Vere's former tutor Laurence
Nowell had custody of the epic 'Amleth'; Lord Cecil had an original
copy of 'Beowulf', both of them the ancient Scandinavian background.
De Vere was only a few miles from his grandmother's extensive library
at Billesley. Exiled from court, bankrupt, dishonored by his affair
with Anne Vavasour and the near fatal duels he had had with her brothers,
there was plenty to be angry about. 'Hamlet' became the voice and
their move the occasion for summing up all he knew, felt, and remembered.
He continued to revise it even after it played widely in England.
Like Faust and Goethe, Hamlet was himself made immortal. We need
only repeat the dramatis personae to prove his identification with
the play.

Hamlet remembers Yorick from twenty three years before. Will Somers
died when De Vere was ten. This would make Hamlet/De Vere thirty-three,
an awkward age for a student just returned from Wittenberg. De Vere
was thirty-three in 1583. His father died mysteriously and his rival
took over his lands, in 'Hamlet' the whole kingdom. His father's
rival's lieutenant married De Vere's mother indecently soon after
the funeral. In 'Hamlet', the two are reduced to a single villain,
Claudius, the name a reminder of Rome's imperial vice. Gertrude is
Margery's fictional equivalent, cold yet pitiful, perhaps permanently
ruined by the trauma of her husband's death. One day she had been
mistress of a earldom. A day later she was a rightless female auctioned
to the highest bidder. Her licentiousness afterwards seems to fit
into the syndrome of limerance, being drawn to one's dominating partner.
The phenomenon occurs also in Richard III. After killing two children,
his threatened rivals, he seduces their mother. She is attracted,
submits. This pattern did not disappear with medieval nobility. It
continues in the declasse trophy bride.

The usurper's councilor
Polonius resembles Cecil so closely it has never been a subject
of dispute. Cecil was referred to derisively
as "Pondus", aping his ponderous sayings, also Polus because
he walked about with a staff. His humped back brought forth the derisive
term "The Camel", which appears in 'Hamlet'. In the original
version of the play, his name was "Corambis", two-hearted,
because Cecil's motto was "Cor Unum, Via Una","One
Heart, One Way". This was so flagrant a slur upon the Queen's
Chief Minister, the second printing had his name as Polonius, a reference
to the backwater kingdom of Poland with another fake Latin ending,
meaning roughly Sir Sausagehead.

Further parallels include the reference to shipbuilders in the first
scene, since Cecil was trying to build up the fleet in preparation
for the war with Spain; the reference to Polonius as a fishmonger,
owing to Cecil's attempts to make the citizens eat fish twice a week
and prime the fisheries industry; the tiresome precepts, so like
Cecil's imitations of Montaigne; the depiction of Polonius as eaten
by political worms, since Cecil was born the year of the Diet of
Worms; and the never forgotten 'falling out at tennis', recalling
Cecil's favorite Sidney running from a duel with De Vere that originated
on a tennis court. This interfering martinet finally connives to
marry off his daughter Ophelia to the Prince, as did Cecil match
his daughter and De Vere. Ophelia is Greek for profit, also meaning
indebtedness, a compressed description of De Vere's history with
the mercantile Cecil family.

From 'Amleth' De Vere
took the royal vendetta, from 'Beowulf' he borrowed poison, swords,
and the dying-speech motif. But none of
this tells what 'Hamlet' is about: his high birth, his orphaned state,
the morally-void cannibalism of his class, the ultimate sacrifice
of the House of Oxford to the rising money-based economy–it meant
the end of the feudal age. Though he was the brilliant and gifted
genius produced on its cross-currents, a Renaissance Man, how was
he or anyone to live an honorable life in this bestial world? Like
De Vere, Hamlet was the last ancient and first modern man. He personified
tradition, aristocracy, the higher pitch of the human instrument
re-sounding the celestial spheres. "The heavens themselves,
the planets, and this center/ Observe degree, priority, and place/
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form/ Office and custom, in
all line of order" (Troilus and Cressida, I, 3, 87-) He would
not give up honoring the perfection that existence is.

Hamlet also was De Vere the philosopher who corresponded with and
visited Sturmius, one of the greats of that era. In 'Hamlet' he asked
all the right questions: what is death?; what is the physical realm?;
what is the basis for the human soul?; when knowledge means nothing,
is there anything more?

Doubt thou the stars are fire?
Doubt that the sun doth move?
Doubt truth to be a liar?
But never doubt I love

('Hamlet', II, 2, 115-)

His summing-up, much of
it made available to England by his own sponsorship, starts with "Hamlet's Book",
'Cardanus Comforte', a key to understanding the play:

But if thou compare death to long travel . . . there is nothing
that doth better or more truly prophecy the end of life, than
when a man dreameth that he doth travel and wander into far
countries and chiefly if he imagineth himself to ride upon
a white horse that is swift, and that he traveleth in countries
unknown without hope of return, in such sort naturally divining
that [this] shortly will come to pass in deed.

[It is the] dread
of something after
death, the undiscover'd country
from whose bourn no traveler returns, [that] puzzles the will,
and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to
others we know
not of.

(Hamlet III, 1,
79-)

This prospect Hamlet expresses as:

To die, to sleep no more; and by a sleep to say we end
the heartaches and the thousand natural shocks that flesh
is heir to; 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd
To die, to sleep...perchance to dream.

('Hamlet', III, l, 60-)

Similarly, where Cardanus says:

"A man
is nothing but his mind: if the mind be discontented the man
be all disquiet
though all the rest be well."

Hamlet says:

"There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it
so...Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native
hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
and enterprise of great pitch and moment..turn awry and lose the
name of action." ('Hamlet': II, 2)

Where Cardanus assures, "Good and evil Fortune imparteth nothing
to blessed life," Hamlet concludes to his friend Horatio, "Thou
hast been a man that hath taken Fortune's buffets and rewards with
equal thanks." ('Hamlet': II, 2)

So death is a journey;
and existence is ruled by Fate accepted evenly, and thus subtly
met and dissolved of its power to strike fear. Life
is brief, the gods obscure. Then what is our earthly matter, this "quintessence
of dust" we inhabit so briefly? De Vere answers this through
the philosophy of his faithful secretary Nicholas Hill, the Laughing
Philosopher, who feared no hardship. He modified Democritis's theory
that all life is formed of atoms, adding that they never disappear
but enjoy infinite existence once set in motion. He immortalized
matter, implying a corresponding immortality of matter's energy,
the invisible sense that is more than instinct or hunger, perhaps
the soul?. Hamlet refers to it when trying to lift his mother from
her corrupted weakness:

Sense sure you have,
Else you could not have motion; but sure that sense
Is apoplex'd, for madness would not err
Nor sense to ecstasy was ne'er so thrall'd
But it reserv'd some quantity of choice
To serve in such a difference

('Hamlet': III, 4, 70-)

The idea is very close to the unlocalized moral sense Descartes declared
is germane to human nature. When his mother cannot throw off her
paralysis, Hamlet implores:

O throw away the worser part of it
And live the purer with the other half

('Hamlet': III, 4)

In a play
thought cynical and religiously blank, this is a mystical declaration
for moral
action and its redeeming power. It all but
repeats the words of Christ, "go and sin no more". To De
Vere the ground of being that animates the potentially human soul
is this binding energy to right action, a subset of the ordered forms
of the universe. The American Founding Fathers referred to it as "sacred
honor", needing no God-figure for support. In fact, De Vere
voiced the word 'honor' in his plays 690 times. Fully a quarter of
the underlined passages of his Geneva Bible (viz. Stritmatter) he
incorporated, invoking new language, into the works of "Shakespeare".
To return to the initial question of this discussion, De Vere's moral
conviction
is, even when knowledge as compass fails, the impulse to right action
remains, or in Christ's example, unconditional love, the potentiality
of humanity most like the divine.

These
things may be true, but they are also too late in Hamlet's fate
to live out. 'Too late' is the precondition of tragedy. De Vere
saw more tragedy than the sad vindication of his protagonist, bathing
his dying honor in blood. At the center of the play is the playlet,
the recital of Troy's destruction and fall. This image was De Vere's
primary historical archetype which cast deep meaning upon his own
life and time. Like Achilles' shield, the tale of Troy is both past
and present, dead yet on-going reality. His childhood fixation with
history proved apt. Man's fate, personal and collective, is his tragic
drama. Great civilizations are sacked. The Vandals and criminals
move in with their devolving minds and motives:

So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural actions
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause
And in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen in the inventors' hands

('Hamlet': V, 2)

In that
chaos, Hamlet can only ask his loyal friend to aid him after death, "things
standing thus unknown", and bring his cause
to fruition. His appeal is so close to Revelations 14:13 and Ecclesiasticus,(Psalm
38, footnote c) it could not be co-incidental: "Write. Blessed
are the dead, which hereafter die in the Lord. Even so saith the
Spirit, for they rest from their labors, and their works follow them".
And "[W]e patiently ...trust that God will clear our cause and
restore us to our right." (Roger A. Stritmatter, 'Edward De
Vere's Geneva Bible' quoted in Mark Anderson,
Shakespeare By Another Name, App. A, p. 391-2) This was the basis
in faith and
language for De Vere to say through Hamlet, "Report me and my
cause aright to the unsatisfied..." He relied on his friends
and through them upon providence, "a divinity that shapes our
ends, rough-hew them though we will."

It remains to be proven whether his cause and self shall be reported
aright. However those were not his last words to future time. 'The
Tempest', his final play, gives evidence of how he came to face that
horizon. As though Philoctetes himself, Prospero the Magician says:

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint. Now, 'tis true,
I must be here confin'd by you
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands!
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirit to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair
Unless I be reliev'd by prayer
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardon'd be
Let your indulgence set me free.

So asking for, he gives
grace, and the final benediction to earth are his simple Anglo-Saxon
words, "Be free, and fare thou well!"